


Maturity

by viajera_pensativa



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, First Dates, Fix-It of Sorts, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Serious, Silly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:35:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23663983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viajera_pensativa/pseuds/viajera_pensativa
Summary: In which all your wildest dreams of characters actually communicating with each other come true. In this story, specifically about Harry and Cho's Hogsmeade date.
Relationships: Cho Chang/Harry Potter
Kudos: 19





	Maturity

**Author's Note:**

> This started with a concept, not a scene or characters. I then picked a somewhat random passage from a book and applied the concept. I've never been a particular Harry/Cho shipper at all, but I do ship Harry having some healthier dating experiences as a teenager, so I'm satisfied with where this ended up. 
> 
> If you notice any typos or minor errors, please feel free to say so in the comments. I don't have a beta. The title is a working one, as well.
> 
> There are a few specific sentences and some general concepts from canon, especially at the beginning. You'll probably recognize what's what.

"What can I get you, m'dears?" Madam Puddifoot, a stout woman with a shiny black bun, asked Cho and Harry as they sat at the wooden table next to the window of the tea shop. Harry stared across the table at Cho, who looked back expectantly. _Oh_ , he thought, _she wants me to order for us._

"Er...what do your recommend?" Harry finally asked. Madam Puddifoot raised her eyebrows and looked him over. 

"We've got somethin' special for Valentine's today. An herbal blend." 

"OK. Two of those, please?" Madam Puddifoot smiled as she scribbled something on her notepad. As she retreated to the kitchen, Harry noticed that at the next table, Roger Davis was now kissing his blond-haired date. Harry looked at Cho, feeling hot, and found his eyes searching for somewhere else to land - the table, out the window, the ceiling. This last did not turn out so well as one of the hovering cherubs threw confetti in his eyes. Fortunately his glasses blocked the worst of it, but he imagined there were now pieces stuck to his hair. Should he try to finger-comb them out? Or was that too self-conscious? 

His thoughts were interrupted by the return of Madam Puddifoot with a tray with two steaming teacups, which she placed in front of Harry and Cho. She also set a small bowl of sugar cubes and a dainty cream pitcher in the middle and said, "Enjoy," with another smile before going to clear a table of a couple that had just left. Harry took a sip of the tea, which was quite warm, but not scalding. Cho dropped a sugar cube in hers first. 

"Umbridge sure was awful in class yesterday, wasn't she?" Cho asked, to Harry's relief. 

"Oh - oh yeah, definitely."

"I'm so sick of her idiotic little smirks. I think she's quite ruined the color pink for me too. It was never my favorite, but now I think I'm allergic." Cho grinned halfheartedly. 

"Yeah. I can imagine." Harry still didn't know quite what to say, so he raised his tea to his mouth again as an excuse not to talk. Cho did the same. Despite not being sure what to talk about, Harry did feel a little less awkward now. The aromas of the tea were soothing. He noticed Davis still snogging his date and now, instead of feeling awkward in their presence, he found them amusing. "Bit enthusiastic, aren't they?" He raised his eyebrows and gestured with his cup toward the pair. 

Cho glanced over and blushed. "Yeah - I suppose you could say that." Her eyes darted to his, and he wondered again if she wished that the two of them were kissing. He decided to go with a distraction tactic to postpone worrying about that. 

"Is it always so crowded in here?"

She looked around, as if just noticing how many people were in the shop. "Oh, no, I don't think so. Although it isn't like I've been here many times. I came here last year on Valentine's Day and I think it was about the same." Her eyes widened then and she took a sip of tea as if to hide her face. It took Harry a moment to realize that this was because she had just brought up being on a date with someone else, and another moment to wonder if she had come with Cedric. His stomach felt heavy all of a sudden. They sat there in silence. He kept drinking his tea as well, which was halfway gone now. A few minutes passed in silence. Harry was pretty sure they were both now thinking about Cedric, as if his ghost had pulled up a third chair to their small table and was sitting with them. Resigning himself to the fact that this was the elephant in the room, he decided to go ahead and confirm. 

"Did you come with - "

"I'm sorry for bringing up -" Cho spoke at the same time, and then they both cut themselves off. "Yeah," she said sadly, "I came with Cedric. I'm sorry for bringing him up right now." She stared down at her cup, shoulders slumped. "I suppose I've ruined our date?" Her voice was so quiet and dull, nothing like the confident Quidditch player that Harry was used to, or the spirited member of the D.A. who was always eager to show off her mastery of a new spell. Part of his brain registered this, but he was also finding it difficult to breathe. Memories of a graveyard were intruding on his mind's eye as his hands gripped the edge of the table.

"Can we go outside for some air?" he managed to spit out. 

Cho looked up at him and seemed to register that something was wrong. "Of course. Let's do that." She fished a Sickle out of her robe pocket and left it on the table, which should be more than enough to cover their tea and then some. Even though Harry had asked to go outside, he was still sitting stiffly in his chair. Cho pulled lightly at his arm. "Let's go." Harry rose with the pressure and she directed him outside. 

They started walking away from the High Street, toward the edge of town. The pressure in Harry's chest had lessened, and he became aware that Cho's hand had slipped down his arm into his own hand as they walked. Soon they came to a wooden fence on the edge of a small pasture, which Harry leaned against while he looked around at the surrounding mountains and surprisingly blue sky. Cho loosened her grip to let their fingers slide apart, placing her crossed arms on the top slat. 

"Can I ask you something, Harry?" she said. He nodded. "I'm a bit nervous that I shouldn't say this, and you don't have to talk about it if you don't want to, but were you remembering the night Cedric died in there?" 

He froze for a moment, but it was so obvious, why deny it? "I did, yeah." 

"I can't even imagine how awful that was for you." She gently scuffed her foot over a tuft of grass next to the bottom board. "Do you want to talk about it, or do you want to talk about something else?"

Harry was a bit taken aback. Did he want to talk about it? No one had asked him this. Everyone avoided the topic, whether for their benefit or his. Even Ron and Hermione generally did not mention what had happened the night that Voldemort came back. He really wasn't sure. Normally this might have caused him to freeze up, but instead he just said, "I don't know." He paused and added, "No one has really asked me if I want to talk about it." 

Cho looked at him, heaved a sigh, and paced in front of him. She looked up to the sky, eyelids partly closing. "I'm pretty out of my league here. I have no idea how to have this conversation with you, or whether I even should. I can't believe it didn't occur to me that this would come up. Now it seems obvious that it would." She took another breath, and looked at him, before sinking to sit on the ground. Harry found himself sinking down beside her. 

"I suppose you're right. It does seem obvious, doesn't it?" He pulled his knees up to his chest and stared out at the cottages sprinkled on the mountain slopes. "It's out of my league, too. It's out of everyone's league. I think that's why no one has asked me if I want to talk about it." He reached down and pulled up a small handful of grass from the ground, gently flinging the ripped up blades about. "I think I might want to talk about it. But I don't think you should have to hear about it. It's bloody messed up."

"I need to, though!" she burst out. "I mean, I want to. I said that it didn't occur to me that this would come up, but on some level I think I hoped that you would tell me what happened. No one really explained anything to me. But it would be unfair and selfish to you to expect you to tell me about such an awful thing." 

Harry thought again about the graveyard, about seeing the spell hit Cedric faster than he could imagine, about his own powerlessness to stop it. Instead of obscuring his vision, now it seemed unreal, as if it had happened to someone else or was a story he had read in a book. Could he tell Cho about that? If anyone had asked him to talk about this yesterday, or any other time, he was pretty sure he would have wanted to run away as fast as he could. But now, out here with Cho, it seemed like perhaps he did want to tell someone about this - someone other than Dumbledore, who cared, but ultimately needed to hear his story so that he could wage a war, not because he wanted to just _listen_. 

"Right then. How bout this. I'll tell you one thing. One thing today. And then I need a break. And maybe we can talk about it again another time?" He looked in her eyes, which somehow was nowhere near as nerve-wracking as it had been less than an hour ago in that tea shop. This moment also seemed unreal, but not in the same way as the memories of the graveyard. "Is that okay?"

"Of course," she said, and made a jerking motion with her arm, then stopped. "I was going to hold your hand. Earlier it felt very automatic to, you seemed really out of it and I was trying to get us out of town. But do you want me to?" Harry's hands dug into the grass again, and pulled up more blades by their roots. He squeezed his eyes shut, and shook his head. 

"No - I'm sorry. It isn't that I don't want to, generally, but I don't know if I can do that while I talk about this." He sighed. "Right. So, one thing, yeah?" He looked at her for confirmation, and she nodded. "Here goes." He searched his thoughts for a moment and said, "It happened very fast. The cup was a portkey - you probably heard that part. Almost as soon as we arrived - it happened. They killed him."

"They?" Cho asked. 

"Voldemort's...helper. One of his followers. Voldemort ordered him to - to kill him. And he did. The follower." _And it's my fault,_ a niggling voice in his head said, _if I hadn't let Wormtail go...if I hadn't made Cedric take the cup with me...._

"So it wasn't really You-," Cho stopped and a look of resolve and even a hint of anger passed over her face. "It wasn't _Voldemort_ that actually killed him?" She shuddered. 

"No. He couldn't...he wasn't - another man did it. I...I know him. I met him before. It's a long story. But Voldemort gave the order." Harry suddenly found that he did want to hold Cho's hand, and reached out for her. She looked at him in mild surprise, but gently squeezed his palm in hers. Then she let out another deep sigh. 

"Out of our league, right? I think you're right - that was enough to talk about for one day. It was enough for me to hear about, anyway." She looked at Harry. "Do you...feel ready to walk back?"

Harry suddenly brought his palm to his forehead, and the tension of the topic disappeared, compartmentalized again as it had been for months. "Oh no! I just remembered! I was supposed to meet Hermione at The Three Broomsticks! I wonder if I'm too late." At this, he felt Cho's grip on his hand slacken a little. 

"Hermione? You're meeting her today?" Her voice had changed in pitch. 

"Yeah, she - wait, no! Not for Valentine's Day?" He almost laughed at the absurdity of the idea, but caught himself just in time and let out a strong breath instead. "Come on, you don't really think I'd do that would you? Make two dates for one day?" 

Cho looked chagrined and muttered, "No, of course not, that was silly."

"Look, if we're gonna get to know each other better and you haven't realized already, you have to understand that Hermione is not someone I'd ever date. She's like my sister. We've been friends since first year. She's always up to something - she's the one who had the idea for the D.A., you know. And today she asked me to meet her for some mysterious reason. I told her I had plans, but she insisted, and she can be really pushy. Like a sister, remember? Would you come with me, actually? Maybe it won't take long, and then we can walk back together." 

Cho's grip had returned to it's former strength in Harry's hand. "Alright then. I'll come. But you have to buy me a butterbeer, because I bought the tea," she teased. 

"Deal," Harry smiled. "I'll even get us some food if you want. It's lunchtime, isn't it?" He pushed himself off the ground and pulled Cho up with him, mirroring how she had pulled him up at the tea shop earlier in the day. She happily leaned her weight into his pull and rose up from her spot on the grass. Then she twisted around, brushing some grass and dampness from the seat of her robes. 

"You probably have grass on your robes, too." Harry twisted around to check. "I'll brush it off for you, if you want," she said with a sly tone in her voice. Harry's eyebrows shot to the sky. 

"Are you - did you just -, " he spluttered, turning red. She put her hands up in a placating gesture. 

"Just teasing! Here!" She cast a quick _scourgify_ and drying spell on both their robes, Harry still in shock at her blatant flirting. Or was it that blatant? Maybe he was just inexperienced. When she was done with the spell, she gave him a sort of sideways shoulder bump and said, "Let's go, yeah? I'm peckish." So they began their walk back up the lane, kicking pebbles as they went. 

As they passed Madam Puddifoot's, they did not realize that she was looking out her window at them while she bussed a few more tables in the less-populated shop. She had a self-satisfied smile as she took a tray of cups back to the kitchen, where a canister of herbs sat on a shelf, labeled, "Maturi-Tea."

**Author's Note:**

> OK, so that was cheesy, I know. But I like it XD. And I decided to make it a multi-chapter fic too. I will add tags as I go. If you have any suggestions for appropriate tags that aren't included please let me know.


End file.
